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Here’s Why Experts Say to Ditch Your Old Cutting Boards
Before you prep another meal, here’s what you need to know:
Plastic boards shed microplastic particles into your food with every cut.
Wooden boards trap moisture and food residue, the perfect breeding ground for hidden bacteria and toxic mold that transfers to your food.
Est. 2026 · Vol. I · The Daily Grievance
Grump News
"The worst thing that happened to me today that you NEED to know about. And some other news stuff."
❖ The Gripe ❖
A Personal Affront, Reported Faithfully
Researchers at Purdue University say the clean smell after you mop is not the smell of clean. Scented cleaners carry compounds like limonene, the lemon one, and linalool, the lavender one. Indoors, those react with ozone in the air and within minutes turn into billions or trillions of particles small enough to get deep into your lungs. While you clean, the levels of those compounds in a room can climb to tens or even hundreds of times what you would find in a forest. The researchers say the total dose you breathe in can be higher than standing near heavy traffic. Their advice is fragrance-free products and an open window. I mopped the kitchen on Saturday. Then I stood there and breathed it in on purpose, because I was proud of myself.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
New York City says DoorDash underpaid more than 260,000 delivery workers between April 2022 and June of this year. The city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection found some workers were not paid at all for jobs they finished, others were paid late, and pay on batched orders was worked out in ways that broke the law. The settlement comes to $131.5 million, with $115 million going to the workers and the rest to penalties and costs. The payments are supposed to start this fall, automatically, with no claim to file. The company brought in $13.7 billion in revenue last year. I tipped a driver four dollars in March and I still lie awake wondering if it was enough.
😩 Most Exhausting
Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan watched the brains of sleeping mice through skulls kept see-through with a special resin. About fifty seconds before REM sleep, the stage tied to dreaming, blood flow to the brain started to rise. At the same time, the level of ATP, the molecule neurons actually run on, went down. The change began at the back of the cortex and moved forward. The team thinks neurons may be burning through energy to reorganize connections involved in memory. More fuel comes in and the brain still ends up short. I have woken up tired for most of my adult life, and now there is a mechanism.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
The New York State Jigsaw Puzzle Association gathered people in Binghamton to go after three Guinness World Records in one day. One was the largest human jigsaw puzzle, which meant beating the current record of more than 2,400 people. A little over two hundred showed up. The others were the most signatures on a puzzle and the fastest completion of a 40,000-piece puzzle, spread over ten panels at ten stations with under eight hours to finish. The association's social media chair said it did not look like they would break the record, but it was a really fun attempt. I have had a thousand-piece puzzle on the dining table since Easter and the corner is missing.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
Zoo Atlanta welcomed two giant pandas from China on Sunday morning, under an agreement between Beijing and Washington. They are Ping Ping, a male, and Fu Shuang, a female, both born in 2020. They arrived on a Boeing 777 donated by FedEx and known as the FedEx Panda Express. The zoo, which had seven cubs born to two of its pandas between 2006 and 2016, is now one of three zoos in the country with giant pandas. The new pair will spend about a month in quarantine before anyone gets to see them. Larry rode to the vet in the back seat last week and complained the entire way.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ Scientists burned their own scrolls to learn how to read ancient ones — When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E., it carbonized about 1,800 papyrus scrolls at Herculaneum, in what is thought to be the only intact library to survive from antiquity. A team including researchers from Berkeley, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and University College London made replica scrolls, had high school students write on them with reed pens in ink mixed with lead, then baked them black in a low-oxygen furnace. On X-ray scans, the lead made the letters show up bright against the burned papyrus, even at very small amounts. It could help read the real ones without unrolling them. I burned toast on Thursday and learned nothing.
▸ People who shared a medieval grave were usually not family, DNA shows — Researchers at Stockholm University analyzed ancient DNA from 142 people buried at three medieval sites in Sweden, more than sixty of them children and teenagers. Archaeologists have long assumed that adults and children buried together were parents and children or other close kin. In most cases, the lead researcher says, that is not what they found. Close relatives turned up together less often than expected, even in cemeteries where plenty of people were related. The family plot has room for eleven and nobody has asked me about the seating.
▸ Scientists found smells that could keep honeybees off pesticide-treated crops — A team at the University of California, Riverside trained a machine-learning model on how honeybees and fruit flies respond to different chemicals, then used it to screen more than fifty million compounds. It flagged about 130 that should repel honeybees. Seven were tested in the field, and all of them kept bees away without harming them. The idea is to steer bees clear of pesticides without giving up on protecting the crops. I own a cologne that does this to people.
Thanks for subscribing to my grievances.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
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